OPTing In – The OnProcess Technology, Inc. Blog

Article: The Buzz About CEM March 3, 2010

Our emphases in bold.  Our comments in (italics). Link to original article below.

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=188410
Caroline Chappell

On a single day at the end of 2009, Anthony Behan, global analytics solutions executive within the Global Communications Industry group at IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), took separate calls from the COO of one of the world’s largest multinational operators, the CEO of a former incumbent, and the CEO of a regional operator, all with the same request: How should they go about investing in analytics to ensure they can run a smarter business?

Analytics – specifically, analytics relating to the customer experience – is set to be a hot area of telco interest in 2010, as operators seek to squeeze more revenue and profit out of maturing services. Customer experience management (CEM) is fast becoming closely associated with operator initiatives, such as churn prevention, incremental average revenue per user (ARPU) gains through upselling and cross-selling services, and market differentiation by focusing on the customer’s experience with the network operator. (You may want to look here for how OnProcess Technology is helping telecoms and subscription TV providers today).

As detailed in the new Heavy Reading Services Software Insider, “Beyond CRM: Customer Experience Management,” CEM is quickly emerging as a key component of network operator efforts to reshape their business models to conform to new “telco 2.0″ market realities. The key to CEM is to join up existing sources of customer experience data with analytical tools. No one is set to accomplish this today, which will create some intriguing and even perplexing scenarios in the months ahead.

Changes are already becoming evident on the technology supplier side. One reason SAP AG (NYSE/Frankfurt: SAP) acquired Highdeal Inc. was to integrate that company’s technology (now SAP Convergent Charging) with SAP Business Objects. Nokia Siemens Networks claimed a market lead when it unveiled its Insight and Experience Framework at this month’s Mobile World Congress. This will use analytical tools to crunch data from NSN’s (Apertio) subscriber data management and charge@once products “to find the pieces of information that are most useful for enhancing a subscriber’s service experience,” NSN says.

Comverse Inc. , Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL), Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC), and Amdocs Ltd. (NYSE: DOX) have led the way in building BSS suites that bring together CRM, online rating and charging, subscriber data management, balance management, and mediation functions. One of the drivers for this trend is that the more angles on the customer experience a BSS vendor can cram into its portfolio, the more data it can make available for analysis. This was confirmed by Mobile World Congress announcements such as the alliance of Redknee Inc. (Toronto/London AIM: RKN) with Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) for CRM and the launch of Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) Subscriber Data Management.

But analysis of BSS data is only part of the CEM story. Equally important is understanding what is going on in end-user devices, the network, and the data center, and analyzing the impact of all that activity on the customer experience. Vendors that can capture and mine massive volumes of network data, regardless of whether subsets of that data are eventually destined for OSS or BSS, are becoming the heroes of the hour. Their aim is to deliver a more holistic picture of the customer experience than BSS or service management systems can on their own.

CEM will be a critical sector to watch over the coming year. Suppliers are still struggling to articulate their strategies – expect to hear a lot more about CEM frameworks and ecosystems as the concept gets refined and vendors try to join up their disparate sets of experience data.

As IBM and NSN have already identified, CEM has the potential to be a big moneymaker for the consultancy/system integrator community. Analytics are a high-value area of business, and extracting them from a complex telco environment to support as broad an issue as the customer experience will require a lot of organizational heavy lifting. The big question for network operators is how quickly and effectively CEM can be deployed to solve their own revenue issues.

— Caroline Chappell, Analyst, Heavy Reading Services Software Insider